Citizenship and the man-child president: Why I turned against federalism

I was turned against federalism by two things. First, when I’d walk up to get
my first-grader after school in the neighborhood of Duke University in Durham,
N.C., I had to keep my hand on my 3-year-old, to keep the students from
touching her. They were not bad kids, but they were nervous and erratic because
their mothers were addicted to heroin when they were born. The second was the president.
Although I had voted for him twice, it appeared to be a mother/child
relationship he had with Hillary. Lots of men — especially artists and
musicians — have that because it works for them. But when it became approved by
a good majority it seemed we had gotten to the end of the difficult work we
started back in 1776.

The first was failure on a catastrophic scale. The nervous students had no
chance. No doubt many of them are dead already. Except for my kids and maybe
three others, the students were all black. The white liberals in the
neighborhood, most of whom worked or taught at Duke, would try to get their
kids in the “AG” classes in the public school, which contained only two or
three students. If they didn’t get in, they’d send them to private schools.

But it was the second part that made a greater difference. What the country had
come to want is a “rock star” for a president. My children’s public school
colleagues were getting knocked up in the sixth grade and smoking reefer on the
way to school and America wanted a rock star for president. I felt it left us
defenseless. The federal government could and would do anything it wanted
without consequences. Citizenship had become mush.

So when George W. Bush invaded Iraq I shared the general desire for revenge of
9/11 but felt the approach was illegal, unconstitutional and simply wrong. But
I knew, as Bush and Cheney did, that with a constituency that wanted a rock
star as president, they could get away with anything they wanted for as long as
they wanted. And they did. Here in New Hampshire and Vermont I proposed with a
few others a states’-rights opposition. We used a model based on the Québécois’,
which wanted Quebec to be considered its own nation within the Canadian
confederation. The state sovereignty movement has since caught on all over the
country. This week Obama brings a first challenge in Arizona.

Gov. Jan Brewer’s challenge to the federal government is a cry from the heart.
It is only that, but it is a start.

States and regions should make their own determinations. It makes the country
stronger. Strong states keep the country honest. Canada was considered a “Third
World North American country” deeply in debt and culturally dependent on
America 20 years ago. Since Quebec has declared itself a nation within a
nation, Canada has a new interior dynamic that is obvious to anyone who is attentive
to it. It has lost its neurotic “pseudo-American” shadow and its economy has
since become the envy of the world. This is democracy as Jefferson imagined it.